The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Jake Ruth, Co-founder & CEO of Stock Unlock, Becoming a Better Investor and Make Confident Decisions

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Stockunlock.com Jake Ruth, Co-founder & CEO of Stock Unlock, Becoming a Better Investor and Make Confident Decisions Show Notes About The Guest(s): ​ Jake Ruth is the co-founder and CEO of StockUnlock.com, an investment education and analysis platform. He has a background in software engineering and entrepreneurship, and he is passionate about helping people demystify investing and make better financial decisions. ​ Summary: ​ Jake Ruth, co-founder and CEO of StockUnlock.com, joins Chris Voss on The Chris Voss Show to discuss the importance of an investing mindset and how to leverage skills and interests in the world of investing. They also talk about the failures and resilience that come with investing and building a business. Jake shares insights into the features and benefits of StockUnlock.com, which provides investment education and analysis tools for retail investors at an affordable price. ​ Key Takeaways: ​ 1. Investing is not just about buying stocks; it's about allocating your time and resources into something that will provide a greater return in the future. 2. Many people fail in investing because they lack the appropriate information and tools to make informed decisions. 3. Leveraging your skills and interests can help you make better investment decisions and understand the companies you invest in. 4. StockUnlock.com offers accessible and affordable investment tools, including training wheels for beginners and comprehensive financial data for experienced investors. 5. The platform provides insights, financial health analysis, growth and profitability metrics, management information, valuation data, and more for over 170,000 stocks across 65 global exchanges. ​ Quotes: ​ - "Investing is allocating your time and resources into something in hopes of a greater return." - Jake Ruth - "If you can't explain what you own in the stock market to a five-year-old, you should not buy it." - Jake Ruth - "StockUnlock.com provides highly accessible and accurate financial data with training wheels for beginners." - Jake Ruth

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you being here. Let's all give a hand to the Iron Lady, singing the operatic intro to the show. Welcome to the Chris Voss Show, my family and friends. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you, but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as at that time when we took apart your dad's watch,

and he has never been proud of you since. We all know who you are he wrote on the show and told me to tell you that so whoever's in the audience going who me that's you anyway guys thank you for joining the show as always for 15 years we've been bringing you the most brightest smartest people the ceos the billionaires the white house presidential advisors the governors the congress members u., astronauts, and Pulitzer Prize winners, the most smartest people who bring the condensed version of a lifetime of journeys and lessons and learning that they're sharing with you,

and they give you what we call the Chris Fascio glow. When you leave listening to these amazing episodes three to four a day, 15 to 20 a week, there you go. And all we ask in return for the Chris Voss Show Glow, it's a very simple exchange of commerce, is that you refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrissvoss, YouTube.com, 4chesschrissvoss, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrissvoss, chrissvoss1, the TikTok, and chrissvossfacebook.com. We have an amazing young man on the show, Jake Ruth, co-founder and chief executive of stockunlock.com is joining us on the show. We're talking about a variety of topics about having the importance of a investing mindset, different ways of failing and building resilience, leveraging skills and interest into your business, and a lot of different other things along the investing scale, and of course, making yourself better.

Jake, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Hopefully, I have that Chris Voss glow going on after that. The Chris Voss show glow. If we don't have it now, by the end of the show, guaranteed. It's in writing. And if you don't believe that, you can call our attorneys. So give us a dot com for you i already did it once but we like to have our clients to do the bookends on there for the guests definitely so oddly enough i do have a big tiktok following so jake ruth official on tiktok got about 47 000 people over there my twitter or should i say x handle is JakeMRuth. I was not there early enough to get the first name. And then for our business, StockUnlock.com or our Stock Unlock YouTube channel are great ways to figure out more about what we're building and more about our business.

There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of Stock Lock and what you guys do. Yeah, so it came from humble beginnings. It's one of those businesses where we didn't realize we were building a business when we first started working on it. But the 30,000 foot view, we provide investment education and analysis tools that are ignored by apps like Robinhood. So new users come to us to demystify investing in a safe space where it's not confetti popped in their face to make trades and lose money. And also existing experienced investors are coming to us consolidating down their existing tools because they're saving money, getting a better experience and better service with our software.

There you go. And so they can go to your website, they can sign up, join thousands of investors who improve the quality of their results through making better confident decisions and using their education and analysis platform. So how long have you guys been building this company? Yeah, so we officially started writing code for it in 2021. I would like to say I was in New York City hiding from COVID in my room and was just watching a lot of financial YouTubers.

So it originally started off with just writing some helpful scripts to help myself in my own investing. There's a whole side plot we can go down to in terms of how I got in contact with Canada's number one investing YouTuber, who I did not know. Borderline harassed this poor man for months until I finally forced him to get on a call with me. I'd like to say the rest is history. We actually went through Y Combinator and raised a venture round of funding for our business after launching. And that was 1.3 million round last summer. So happy to talk about that. I would never have imagined actually saying that. So excited to give your audience a lot of value there. And march forward to today. We have thousands of

paid users across 91 different countries. And even stock unlock aside, whether or not the audience ends up looking at stock lock, most aside, whether or not the audience ends up looking at Stock Unlock, most importantly, and value to your audience here, there's so much I am excited to share about investing principles outside of stocks, how you could form a life where you can start taking advantage of your own time. And when you think of things like an investment throughout every facet of your life, it's really going to help set yourself up for future success. So I'm super excited to be talking about that with you today. Stock Unlock, you can join 28,000 investors. So tell us about your origin story. How did you get to be co-founder of this company?

What was your life journey and what got you interested in building software, I think engineering, and being an entrepreneur? Yeah, well, the analogy behind everything I'm about to tell you is you don't know what's behind a door until you open it. So I am always opening as many doors as I can, trying out as many things, failing a lot, but then eventually over time, finding things that work for me.

So let's flash back to when I was around 10 or 11 years old. My mother had to stop me from having lemonade stands because I was having lemonade stands so much that it was annoying the neighbors. I had a construction worker give me $20 once as a tip. And it was as if my life was complete. There was something about that moment, exchange of capital for services, where I never really looked back. Once I was not allowed to have lemonade stands anymore, I started selling all of my toys and things for five or 10 cents, kind of heckling people coming. Wow.

Were you trying to run away from home and fund it or what was, did you just get the bug of entrepreneurism? What put the bug in you? So I always wanted money for things when I was younger and I grew up in a middle-class family, but definitely, you know, just had what we needed. I didn't really go on any lavish vacations or anything. So even from a young age, my father taught me, you work for an allowance, I would have to save up my own money. I bought my own cell phone and this is back in 2006 or 2007 as a seventh grader.

So I always realized that in order to get what I wanted in life, I needed to do the work and make it happen for myself. There you go. You've got to do the work. Yeah. Work is so important. And so you start some companies as you get older? Yeah. Well, we'll breeze past the weird parts where I was riding a unicycle in the woods, going to Rubik's cube competitions in high school.

I've always been a huge. That sounds like the most interesting actually. It's yes. Speedcubing is a huge sport. So you were doing speedcubing, those guys that I see on like TikTok most interesting, actually. Yes, speed cubing is a huge sport. So you were doing speed cubing, those guys that I see on TikTok and Instagram, where in six seconds they solve the Rubik's Cube? Yeah, it's a lot of competition too. So going from the lemonade stand stories of selling and making money,

I also loved competition and just competing against other people in a holistic way, not a we're going to stomp your face off and leave you bleeding on the sidewalk. Let's have a really good competition. May the best person win. And at the end, you look back and exchange ideas after to see how you could both do better. Are there gangs that do that

where there is a bleeding on the sidewalk if you don't get the Rubik's Cube fast enough? That sounds like something in maybe out of Compton or something. I'll tell you about that after the show. The Rubik's Cube gang's not to be messed with. Really? Really? Take away the pocket projectors and stuff. So what got you interested in software and building software companies? Yeah, my anger towards school and the education system, which has been a bleeding theme through my life. I often hear you say, Chris, I didn't

make it through a second grade. Well, I'm going to one up you there. I got held back in kindergarten and preschool, actually. They didn't let me go to kindergarten with everyone else because I wasn't ready. I got held back in kindergarten or preschool. Wow. You know, that's a joke we wrote, right? That's not even... No, I got held back in preschool, but that's a story for another time. How I got into coding in this business is math was the only thing I ever really understood. I was more into what girl I was going to text next or what party I was going to go to in high school. You know, all the test and off girls. I've seen that movie, yeah.

And my math teacher, her name is Miss Nalbandian, bless her soul. I had taken so many math classes. It was the only thing I was really good at that I was being forced to take AP Calc. But I am a person that does not take AP classes. So I learned that I could get around taking AP Calc by taking AP Computer Science instead, which was a coding course. I took that course and never looked back. The second I saw software get written on the board, over the past 12, 13 years, I've been a software crack head. I can't stop coding. I do it in my spare time. I do it for my job. And Stock & Lock is a culmination of about a decade of experience failing at past startups,

shutting down past companies, working as a software engineer, and eventually building up the social skills and networking capacity to form teams, and then eventually change everything that I have learned from nerdy Rubik's Cubing software engineering goodness into a real product that people actually want, that they want to purchase and that they keep coming back towards because it just provides them that much value. So it sounds like you've gone through the journey of an entrepreneur. You've tried stuff, you failed, you've tried stuff, maybe you didn't like it and moved to something else. So you've been doing the practice runs basically before you hit success?

Yeah, it's less of a choice and more something that I just find myself doing. I can still always try new things. And it's always been something that's ran through me. You know, that's what I do with a lot of my companies. I'm just trying the first one and then being like, I don't want to do this. You know, you throw a lot of different sticks up against the wall or see what sticks to the wall for that matter. And then one day, if you keep throwing stuff up against the wall, some of the sticks, holy crap, that sucks. Yeah. I think Mark Cuban says, it doesn't matter how many things you try

because you only need one thing to work and that's it. And I'm excited to relate to your audience today because some of the people you bring on are very accomplished decades into their career, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Other people are authors, astronauts. I sit right there in the middle, so I can still see both sides kind of the land here. So we have raised money. We do have a business building, but I'm not going to try to do an illusion of grandeur here. I'm not worth tens of millions of dollars. We don't have millions and millions of dollars in revenue. We are on the path towards getting towards our first million in

revenue, but want to be very clear to your audience. I'm someone that is on the journey, constantly learning, will continue to make mistakes. I'm really looking forward to being able to relate to your audience on that level here. There you go. Well, the stories are the most valuable part, the lessons learned, because those are worth trillions of dollars or billions of dollars. I suppose in what does Anthony Robbins always say, knowledge is power in the extent that you use it. But the amount of lessons that we can learn from the wonderful guests we have on the show are the most important. So let's get into it. Let's talk about the importance of an investing mindset.

You, of course, deal with investing on your website. And I suppose that applies to being an entrepreneur, what you do and your stuff, or investing for a financially free life. Why is that important? And let's get into the importance of that mindset. Yeah. One, it's incredibly important. And two, this is something most people don't have, which includes myself for a long time. So I'm sure many of your audience, it seems, including ourselves, went through the public education system. Lots of good things about it, lots of bad things about it. And one thing they do not give you is financial literacy. They more so train you to be a nine to five worker, right? Don't, you know, don't jostle outside the lines

too much, play your role. And there is nothing wrong with that. And the concept I want to introduce to your audience today is a change of mindset as to what investing means. So investing, when we usually hear it is, oh, someone transacts and buys a stock or they buy a house. And those are all right. Those are examples of investing. However, there's a bigger picture here. The concept of investing, taking it out and doing that 30,000 foot view, as you said before, is allocating your time and resources into something, which is an investment or a sacrifice in hopes to see a greater return at the end. So this also extends to personal development. So for example, I would not be in

this place today, if I didn't spend a decade investing in my own skills, as a software engineer, if I didn't spend years networking and investing time to build a network with creators, influencers, as well as engineers to be able to form teams to start companies. So I want to challenge your audience to think about investing as a mindset. Everything they spend their time doing, all the little decisions, those are the moments that make up your life. Even things as small as are you going to buy the Starbucks coffee? Are you going to buy the pack of coffee? What's that money going to turn into the future? If I go to this party three nights a week instead of one and the other two nights, I actually buy a course and gain my skills. How is that going to multiply? And to end this

little mini rant, it comes down to compounding returns and compound interest because humans don't understand the power of compounding in my opinion let's get into that i used to have my my dad used to always do this thing when i was a kid in the 70s he'd and he'd do it with other people he'd always say do you want to do you want a million dollars now or do you want a penny a day on compound interest for the next 10 years or something i think the the example he used was you know everybody say i mean as were like, we'll take the million now or something. I don't remember the exact metrics, but I think most people have heard this analogy and really the penny a day on

compound interest is like more valued or something like that over whatever the X term it is. I just looked it up to remind myself. It's 5.3 million by the end of 30 days. Is it 30 days or 30 years so 30 days and you're 30 days holy crap you double a penny every day for 30 days it will be worth over five million dollars according to the group i just did so maybe don't embarrass me in the comments after that but the most important part of that is when you're halfway through that doubling, you're still in the thousands. So where the compound returns come is at the tail end.

And 99% of people, it's not that they don't have the patience for it. No one just taught us the mindset framework of the investing mindset. So you don't know what you don't know. And most people exit the game or take a loss too early, not realizing that most of the compound returns come in the second half of the compounding cycle. And we're talking about decades here. And so should it be a short-term investing mindset or a long-term investing mindset? Great question. 100% long-term investing. I would actually say that there is no such thing as short-term investing. That would be trading. And I'm not saying that's bad, right? Like you need to find the right balance, but an investment is a very long-term dedication of

resources, dedication of time to see, think about it. You plant a seed, it takes a while for that seed to germinate and grow into a flower. That's really what you're doing with investing. You're planting the seed, you're watering it, and you're making sure at the tail end, it becomes a beautiful flower. Ah, the tail end of the beautiful flower. There you go. I believe there's an OnlyFans name that. I'm not sure what it means. So let's talk about failing leading to resistance. And there's failures in investment. You know, you make a bad choice, make it a bad investment. There's failures of time. How does failures lead to resistance? The entire vibe of what I'm trying to share here is I don't care if people listen to the show and go off invest or they don't invest.

But what people need is like more data and information behind making that decision. So what I like to people are equipped with the correct information. They can then come to their own conclusion about if they want to invest or not. So you can avoid failures finally answering your question by getting the correct information. And common failures we see is people buying a stock because they heard someone else talk about it at a bar. People going to Wall Street bets, which is very huge, and saying, oh, we're going to squeeze the shorts. We're going to buy AMC or GameStop and shoot it to the moon. And the unfortunate reality of that is people are just gambling and trying to get rich quick. And it really tarnishes and puts a bad name

on investing in the market because it puts this false mindset into most retail investors' minds that the stock market's rigged. We can't win at this. There's nothing I can do. I'm going to go get a financial advisor. I'll always be losing.

And that could not be more far from the truth. That's just what media and Wall Street wants you to believe. But in 2023, the tools, open data and software is getting more open source to a point where the tools that were not available to retail investors 10, 20 years ago for basic accounting, reading a balance sheet, reading an income statement, cash flow, realizing that stocks are not gambling chips and that they actually have people working behind them, products behind them, moats around their business, the fog really starts to clear. So many of the failures from investing really stem from a lack of appropriate access to information, as well as a safe environment

where you're not in a Robin Hood app having confetti popped in your face because they want you to take out more margin to buy more Dogecoin. That is what typically gets investors in a bad spot. Definitely. I mean, it's really important to think of what you need to do for the long term and everything else. Leveraging your skills and interests. Tell us about how to leverage skills and interests to do what you want to do. You guys use this to partner up with Canada's number one investing YouTube with subscriber counts and using your software engineering skills. Tell us about that story. Yeah, so there's two parts we could take to this. It's one, how do you view your own skills when starting a business versus how do you apply that to investing?

So for those watching who want to learn how to start a business, you need to recognize where your strengths and weaknesses are. So for me, my strength is product creation, software engineering, building teams, as well as kind of like being a little bit of hype, but more on the raising money investment side of things. What I am not good at is distribution, marketing, sales. And if you don't have distribution, you have the best product in the world. You can put all the time and engineering effort into it. But if no one knows you exist, you're going to fail and no one will buy it. That's true. So the reason why I spent so much time harassing Daniel Pronk, poor soul online, is because he had hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube. He was using the existing investment platforms, overpaying for them, and also using Excel sheets. So in terms of leveraging

skills and finding the right ways to maximize your output in society, I noticed I need someone with distribution sales. I have the engineering product side of things. So flashing through the harassment side of this, when Daniel actually got in contact with me, we are the perfect match because I'm able to powerhouse out high quality product, really great software that people genuinely get value out of to the point where they self-decide on their own to pay for it. And then Daniel's distribution marketing sales channel to his YouTube subscribers, as well as the network he has to other creators was really the distribution that we needed. So that was the perfect handshake match made in heaven there. And I'll take a pause on that. If you have a question, the other half of that answer would be actually applying your strengths more towards the stock market and investing. However, I know you cater to multiple audiences here.

Yeah. Let's parlay that into the investing and how you're using that on your guys' website, et cetera, et cetera. Definitely. So whether you like to believe it or not, I'm speaking directly to you, the listener of this podcast, you have unique skills and insights that other people don't have. I don't care if you are working in a kitchen as a cook, if you are working as a software engineer like me, if you are in a marketing department, you have unique insights into the products and tools being used there. You see the inefficiencies. If you're working as a cook at a restaurant, you'll see what products they're using. You'll see what is the name of the manufacturers and all the equipment. And a lot of these companies are public companies.

So what people need to realize with investing is after you start getting the beginning principles down, you start to learn how to read balance sheets, cash flow statements, income statements. So you start to look at management and understand what's their product, what's their moat, who are their competitors, you can then take your own unique, you can take your own background for whatever it is that you're interested in, and then apply that to the stock market. There are tens of thousands of companies out there. So you could look for restaurant supplies companies, you could look at food companies, you could look at software shops. And I've seen a lot of my friends that work in marketing product and other organizations that will see their company start paying for Jira, which is a product by Atlassian, which is a public company, or people starting to use Paycom, which is pay C ticker symbol on the stock market.

You'll start noticing these trends. And then you can take your knowledge of how to invest from sites like Stock Unlocked to in a carefree place, really analyze those investments and see if you want to start allocating some of your capital into things that you actually understand. Because if you can't explain what you own in the stock market to a five-year-old, you should not buy it. And that is the number one principle people miss because they buy things they don't understand, they lose money, they think the system's rigged. And 95% of people, Chris, to be quite frank, do have the brain to do this stuff. And even if you are a passive investor, you still want to take around 5% of your capital and put into more risky investments, put into ESG, put it behind things you care about. Nike is a public

company. Starbucks is a public company. Airbnb is a public company. All the big outlist stores, beauty and makeup companies are public. There is a whole industry out here for us to become a part of. And I think it's a huge miss by American society, as well as the mindset most Americans have, that this is just something that we can't touch. It's actually never been more accessible to get into it. But it's incredibly important that you have the right tools and mindset where you don't just run in and start yoloing your money. It's very important to have access to information, know what you're doing, and also not be afraid to not invest. If you start looking into it

and you realize it's not for you, don't do it. Buy an index fund, right? But at least now you know. And how does that parlay into what you guys have on the site for stockunlock.com? I'm seeing a lot of really cool stuff that you have here for analyzation.

Let's get into your business and talk about how people can parlay what we've talked about into utilizing what you guys have to offer. It looks like there's a lot of stock insights and graph stuff. Tell us about how we can parlay that into this. 100%. So I also have a great offer at the end of our show, but I'll bookmark that for now. The reason why we built Stock Unlocked, because people might be thinking, okay, cool, but there's other investment platforms out there. There's a handful of issues with existing

investment platforms. One, and what relates to your audience, they are not usable by newbies. Even if you go to Yahoo Finance, if you have never looked at a stock before, the price is bouncing everywhere. There's volume, there's price to earnings ratio, there's operating margin, there's a market cap. It is just an information overload. So right off the bat, most people can't even use the existing tools on the market today since they're not designed with newbies in mind. Second off, the price of these tools is ridiculous. You'll have companies charging $50, $60, $100 a month, thousands of dollars a year, even in the range of $30, $40 a month, Chris, to be quite frank, is highway robbery. Your cash flow is very important and most of that cash should be put into investing in assets, not going into some corporation that's overcharging

for software. It's also very inaccessible. So the software that is out there today, it's very hard to use. It's poorly designed. So Stock Unlock is very unique and special, where over half of the people coming to Stock Unlock are beginner investors. So let's use an analogy here, Chris. When you ride a bicycle, you're never going to go on a bicycle without the training wheels on the bike. You're going to fall, you're going to trip, you're going to get scraped up. So we put training wheels into Stock Unlock. There is a learning mode toggle at the top of our site. With one click, you'll see little question marks pop up everywhere. So that example I used before with Yahoo Finance, where you're looking at all the stock information,

all the numbers, you don't know what everything means is overwhelming. We have a very light touch approach where question mark education widgets will show up. It gives you the definition, how to calculate it, how investors use it. We also have tons of free YouTube content outside of the site where people can watch it, start to learn how to read balance sheets, cash flow statement, income statements, all the financial data that comes out of the Security Exchange Commission and all these very big acronyms that sound scary until you use a site like StockMock. Our price is incredibly accessible. And with the code I'm going to share at the end of this show, I'll be even more accessible. So we just charge $8.99 a month or $89.99 a year. 55% of our subscribers are yearly. We have 80% paid retention year over year. And the reason why is the tools that we provide there cover all the tools from other

platforms that are charging hundreds of dollars a month. We are completely arbitraging the space with highly accessible, highly accurate financial data with training wheels for beginners. So you know what you're looking at. And then we layer on all the tools investors need from watch lists, portfolio tracking, running discounted cashflow calculators. And we hear from our customers every single day, how much time and money we're saving them. And 97%, which is a real number, we just pulled this of stock and lock subscribers claim that stock and lock has made them a better investor. So that is what we offer to people coming to our site today. And I can promise you that we are more accessible than any other site.

Everything's free to use too. So we follow the freemium software package, Chris. So you go to our site, no email, everything's free. And you only pay us after a free trial, which also does not require a credit card. Like you're only ever going to give us money, Chris, if you actually look at this and you say, I like it. We have a 30 day money back guarantee. We hardly ever get asked for refunds, but if someone asks, we just give it to them. We really stand by the value of what we create and are continuing to grow organically by users of the platform telling their friends.

There you go. And you guys have a Discord as well for your community. Yeah, and that is totally free. Some of it's StockMalloc subscribers, some is not. But again, the co-founder of this business who's not here, Daniel Pronk, this guy has 213,000 subscribers on YouTube. He's a very trusted source for fundamental investing, non-predatory investing,

not trading, not reading candlestick charts. This is very, honestly, how it should be just boring in terms of you're not like watching a, you know, stock chart bounce around, you're like drawing a dinosaur on and basically being like, Oh, I need to enter here and sell there. That's, that's not what we're selling. The discord is a free community. YouTubes are free. We're just about to film our 49th episode of our live show that we're a year into actually a couple hours on our stock unlock youtube channel which will be great and yeah we're more than just a software package we're also starting to add ai into our tooling we're gonna have a big relaunch coming up at the beginning of 2024 so we are a startup moving quick solving our customers problems and

we exist live eat breathe sleep die every day by leaving stock and lock and our customers in a better place than when we woke up so it's a evolving improving platform so i'm looking at your website man i put in amazon it's a stock to get charts and and and the data on uh this is pretty amazing i mean you guys have it's like an all-in-one shop of all the data i could ever want to look at stuff. You guys even have some evaluations of flags, green flags or red flags. You give it a score from your insights thing. And so I can see the, you know, the normal thing most people will be looking for,

the one day, one week, one month, year to date, three-year, five-year max, sort of, you know of adjustment of the score. Then you also have the financials. So I've got revenues, earnings, free cash flow, insider transactions. That's kind of interesting to be able to see price targets that people are expecting. You even got the SEC filings, the 10Qs here. I did day trading. So this is all just juicy, wonderful bits. You've got the data on the company, similar stocks, and then you've got a whole host of different tabs where you can go into insights, do analyzation side by side. You can see their financial health, their growth, their profitability, management, valuation.

This is really interesting how this breaks down. You've got another tab for the financials and overall revenue and different breakdowns that you would find on the balance sheet. And you've got them mapped out in a graphical sense. Dividend data, analyst data for price targets. Because, you know, if they don't, that's the one thing, you know, sometimes a company can make a profit, but if they don't hit the expected market targets, those are going to go down. And then you've got insider data.

You actually have the names of areas. Jeffrey Bezos doing a grant and different things. You have all the insider transaction details, at least the ones that are posted, and ownership things. Wow. You guys have everything you could ever want on a stock, I think, when it comes to data. Yeah. We are product experts here. And admittedly, we have areas of improvement for just marketing and sales. So it's a huge pleasure to be

introducing this to your audience today. And I'm glad you brought up the insight scores. So whenever you're looking at a company, there's a few things you want to look at, right? How much debt does this company have? Do their liabilities outweigh their assets? How is this company priced in terms of its overall market capitalization versus the earnings that it's creating? Has there been a lot of insider selling? What's the ownership, et cetera, et cetera. And our insight scores is a very simple one to five score that breaks down into around seven or eight categories that tell you a bit about the health of the business. These are not buy or sell signals, but they do save a ton of

time and are especially helpful to newbies because a lot of people don't know where to start. Insight scores are a perfect place to start. And it's some of the best feedback we have on our platform. And as you saw, Chris, we really offer everything. This stuff typically costs $50, $100 a month. We're again, really arbitraging the space as a startup where I personally identified ways to bring this software at a much lower cost and a much accessible way to consumers. But you know, we're just one guy from New York, one guy in Canada, and now a team of about five or six people. So we are working very hard to let everyone know about this because it's a huge opportunity, a huge goldmine for so many people. And we know that it's

time to grow and scale our company. So it's a pleasure to be with you and a ton of other entrepreneurs on the show because I'm very confident we'll look back on this and say, wow, we talked to Stock Unlock all the way back in 2023 because we have very, very big goals for where we're taking our business. Awesome.

And it looks great. It's very easy in the layout and on the eyes to figure. Sometimes when you look at stock data websites, they look kind of like math or algebra and you're like, what's going on here? They're very analytical mind oriented. They can get access to 170,000 plus stocks across 65 plus global exchanges, free newsletter. You can start a 14 day trial there as well. Tell us about the offer you have for people that you were going to throw out. Yeah. And I should be careful how I word this because in my opinion, we are practically giving away this software.

So if you check out with code VOSS, V-O-S-S at checkout, you will get 30% off our already incredibly low prices. I need to remind the audience, everything is like free anyways for your 14-day free trial. So when we're talking about 30% off, this is after you have tried every single piece of software across the entire tool for two full weeks. And then you can put a very timely site on your own if you want to enter a business exchange with us, which is a very nerdy way of saying you pay us money and you continue to access the website. There you go. There you go. Yeah, you guys have, I don't know, this is just tons of data. Stock Unlock Insights, a DCF calculator, analyst data, personal and public watch list. Those are really important to have.

And it's really inexpensive where you can go in and do everything. Did you guys work with Y Combinator? Did you ever, I noticed one of the companies you worked with is Y Combinator. Did you ever do any startups through those folks? Yeah. So we were in the Y Combinator winner 2022 batch. So Y Combinator was our first professional investor and they definitely played a very critical role in helping myself and both Daniel, the other co-founder mature in terms of how we run a business, talk to investors. That's why I would have never, ever predicted we would end up here. Because when we started building Stock Unlock, it was just a couple nerds hacking in their apartment, solving their own problems,

because we were really pissed off at the existing tools. Like I said, too expensive, not being accessible, didn't give you what you needed. So it all happened, quote, by chance, where Y Combinator actually found and reached out to us. They saw that we were generating a lot of momentum with what we were building. So it was an honor to be associated with Y Combinator and have them as an investor. And they definitely played a critical role in helping us raise money from investors, have a more mature view for our business, and really see the billion dollar idea here that we're encroaching up upon against as opposed to kind of like a mom and pop shop software company. And who are the best clients for you guys? You said you're, I think, from Canada. Where in the world can this be used? And what sort of investors are the best sort of investors that will, you know, that love your service? Yeah, we sell across 91 different

countries. Some places where we're discovering product moats that we have or very unique is we have the best portfolio tracker for fundamental investing as well as currency conversion. So if you're a European customer, you can connect all your different European brokerages, sync them, view them in one common currency. You can track stocks on different stock exchanges if you are that crazy. And then for the beginner users, again, the training wheels and education mode, as well as the insight scores and all the education and accessibility in terms of not being too nerdy on the math and the site make it really, really accessible. So to date, we have just over now 2.7 thousand paying subscribers. Those are all retail consumer investors, around three-fourths of those are the United States, followed by Canada, and then the UK. Where we are moving towards is also

selling to colleges, financial advisors. We are really just on the beginning of our journey here, Chris. We have spent two years building what we believe is a stellar way underpriced for its value product that, by the way, we are not planning on raising the price on that much more. We're going to continue to arbitrage. So anyone who is a beginner investor who wants to learn about the market that's never touched it before, Stock & Lock is for you. If you are an existing investor spending over $10 or $20 a month on other software tools, you should consolidate down to us because I guarantee we do it better for a lower price. If you are a financial advisor and you track

other portfolios for people's accounts that you manage, Stock & Lock is for you. If you are a college student learning about the market, putting this into your coursework, or a professor who's looking to really supercharge their classroom, contact us because we do sales and licenses to colleges. And those are the main consumer segments. It's really anyone that wants to learn more about investing. And I'll end this mini rant by saying, we don't give a shit what you do with your cash after you use stock and lock. I don't fucking care if you buy Doge coin. I don't care if you go out and buy Amazon stock,

right? What I care about is people to stop making foolish, frivolous decisions with their capital, because I hear someone at a bar talk about squeezing AMC because people will do hours and hours of research on buying a toaster, but they won't do any research on buying a stock. So for the love of God, just spend the cost of a half minimum wage dollar of work, the cost of a beer at a bar, put this data in front of you and at least be more informed. You will surprise yourself with how much either better decisions you'll make or terrible decisions you'll avoid making just by giving yourself the tools to make

the right decision on stocks. It is that. Most definitely. That's a wonderful pitch out. Final thoughts that we go out or pitch out to people to sign up with the service. Again, code VOSS, V-O-S-S at checkout, give you 30% off. We're talking, that is as low as $6.29 a month, or it goes down to about $62.99. Those are both in USD currencies. I want to thank you again for having me on. It is a pleasure to be on here. You have one of the best intro to any podcast I've ever heard. To give you serious brain bleed.

Brain bleed. I love it. So it's been a pleasure. And I want to thank the audience for tuning in. And if you ever need to get in contact with us again, my name is Jake Ruth. You can go to stockandlock.com. If you contact support, it'll be one of the founders answering you or our executive assistant, Nestor. And we are really looking forward to interacting with your community.

Also sharing your show in our communities. You know, we got a huge audience as well. So I'm here to bring you value as well, Chris. Although it seems like you're doing pretty well. Yeah, we've been doing this for a while. But we appreciate the support. Definitely. Thanks so much.

I mean, it's been a super fun time. I love your energy. There you go. Thank you. And I love yours as well. So give us the dot coms as we go out. All right. Lock.com.

Again, totally free to try. I won't repitch. That's what we've been talking about this entire time. My handles on social, Jake M. Ruth is my extra Twitter handle. Again, Jake M. Ruth. And then on TikTok, if you are brave enough to go to that social media platform, it is wild out there. Jake Ruth official. I've got around 47,000 maybe bots, maybe real people following me on there. And I'd love to continue the conversation. I'm very friendly. I love talking about investing, stocks, startups, anything like that. And if you want to catch more of Stock Unlock in terms of shows and content, Daniel Pronk on YouTube, Stock Unlock podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

And we do live shows on our YouTube account as well so thank you for the time to make the plug thank you for coming on the show jake we really appreciate it's been fun and interesting we learned a whole lot so thanks to my honest for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortress chris foss linkedin.com fortress chris foss during the big linkedin newsletter that thing grows like a weed and 130 000 group over there on uh linkedin as well go to chris foss one on tiktok you know all the shows you guys have heard it all chris foss facebook. Go to Chris Voss one on TikTok. You know all the shows. You guys have heard it all. Chris Voss, Facebook.com, I think is the one I missed.

Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. We certainly appreciate it. Go to all the wonderful places we have on the net. Support all of our guests. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.